Radiation curable materials have found increased use as coatings, adhesives, and sealants over the past three decades for reasons including low energy consumption during cure, rapid cure speed through both radical and cationic mechanisms, low curing temperature, wide availability of curable materials, and the availability of solvent-free products. These benefits have made such products especially suited for rapidly adhering and sealing electronic and optoelectronic devices that are temperature sensitive or cannot conveniently withstand prolonged curing times. Optoelectronic devices particularly are often thermally sensitive and may need to be optically aligned and spatially immobilized through curing in a very short time period.
Numerous optoelectronic devices are also moisture or oxygen sensitive and need to be protected from exposure during their functional lifetime. A common approach is to seal the device between an impermeable substrate on which it is positioned and an impermeable glass or metal lid, and seal or adhere the perimeter of the lid to the bottom substrate using a radiation curable adhesive or sealant.
A common manifestation of this package geometry is exemplified in FIG. 1, which discloses the use of a radiation curable perimeter sealant (1) to bond a metal or glass lid (2) over an organic light emitting diode (OLED) stack (3) fabricated on a glass substrate (4). Although various configurations exist, a typical device also contains an anode (5), a cathode (6 ), and some form of electrical interconnect between the OLED pixel/device and external circuitry (7). For the purposes of this invention, no particular device geometry is specified or required aside from one which incorporates an adhesive/sealant material such as a perimeter sealant (1).
In many configurations, as for the example in FIG. 1, both the glass substrate and the metal/glass lid are essentially impermeable to oxygen and moisture, and the sealant is the only material that surrounds the device with any appreciable permeability. For electronic and optoelectronic devices, moisture permeability is very often more critical than oxygen permeability; consequently, the oxygen barrier requirements are much less stringent, and it is the moisture barrier properties of the perimeter sealant that are critical to successful performance of the device.
Good barrier sealants will exhibit low bulk moisture permeability, good adhesion, and strong interfacial adhesive/substrate interactions. If the quality of the substrate to sealant interface is poor, the interface may function as a weak boundary, which allows rapid moisture ingress into the device regardless of the bulk moisture permeability of the sealant. If the interface is at least as continuous as the bulk sealant, then the permeation of moisture typically will be dominated by the bulk moisture permeability of the sealant itself.
It is important to note that one must examine moisture permeability (P) as the measure of effective barrier properties and not merely water vapor transmission rate (UVTR), as the latter is not normalized to a defined path thickness or path length for permeation. Generally, permeability can be defined as WVTR multiplied by permeation path length, and is, thus, the preferred way to evaluate whether a sealant is inherently a good barrier material.
The most common ways to express permeability are the permeability coefficient (e.g. g·mil/(100 in2·day.atm)), which applies to any set of experimental conditions, or the permeation coefficient (e.g. g·mil/(100 in2·day) at a given temperature and relative humidity), which must be quoted with the experimental conditions in order to define the partial pressure/concentration of permeant present in the barrier material. In general, the penetration of a permeant through some barrier material (permeability, P) can be described as the product of a diffusion term (D) and a solubility term (S): P=DS
The solubility term reflects the affinity of the barrier for the permeant, and, in relation to water vapor, a low S term is obtained from hydrophobic materials. The diffusion term is a measure of the mobility of a permeant in the barrier matrix and is directly related to material properties of the barrier, such as free volume and molecular mobility. Often, a low D term is obtained from highly crosslinked or crystalline materials (in contrast to less crosslinked or amorphous analogs). Permeability will increase drastically as molecular motion increases (for example as temperature is increased, and particularly when the Tg of a polymer is exceeded).
Logical chemical approaches to producing improved barriers must consider these two fundamental factors (D and S) affecting the permeability of water vapor and oxygen. Superimposed on such chemical factors are physical variables: long permeation pathways and flawless adhesive bondlines (good wetting of the adhesive onto the substrate), which improve barrier performance and should be applied whenever possible. The ideal barrier sealant will exhibit low D and S terms while providing excellent adhesion to all device substrates.
It is not sufficient to have only a low solubility (S) term or only a low diffusivity (D) term in order to obtain high performance barrier materials. A classic example can be found in common siloxane elastomers. Such materials are extremely hydrophobic (low solubility term, S), yet they are quite poor barriers due to their high molecular mobility due to unhindered rotation about the Si—O bonds (which produces a high diffusivity term (D). Thus, many systems that are merely hydrophobic are not good barrier materials despite the fact that they exhibit low moisture solubility. Low moisture solubility must be combined with low molecular mobility and, thus, low permeant mobility or diffusivity.
For liquid materials that are radiation cured to solid sealants, such as the inventive compositions, the attainment of lower molecular mobility within the cured matrix is approached through high crosslink density, microcrystallinity, or close packing of molecular backbones between the crosslinked portions of the matrix.